Archive for May, 2013

If you are familiar with Ted Talks, you’ll know that they’re almost unfailingly informative, interesting, and well put-together. Sofía and I watched two today that I’d like to share with you. If you’re at all interested in the intersection of food, government, food corporation profits and American health, please watch and share these talks. They’re […]

I’ve been wanting to try ramps for the longest time; they’ve been the culinary rage for a couple years now but I haven’t managed to find them anywhere (and it’s not like we get a lot of opportunities to eat in nice restaurants). A couple days ago I found the next best thing, a cross […]

The 7 broilers (and three layers) are just loving their free-ranging pasture pen. They spend most of the day over on the overgrown part of it, munching clover and hiding in the waist-high grasses. The during the afternoon they seem to hang out over here in the swampy area. Perhaps because the mud is cool? […]

It’s not just the fruit trees that are doing well in the garden. Everything has really started to take off. We’ve already had a couple salads with homegrown arugula and two meals of spinach. I wish I’d paid more attention to planting lettuce and spinach in the spring, but I tend to overlook them in […]

Late spring might be my favorite season in the garden. Everything swells with life, eagerly burgeoning with promise, as yet unravaged by bugs and disease. The weeds are under control, the weather is nice enough to go out every day. Peaches. For the first time, Negronne figs. It was transplanted this year from the pool […]

I got a bleary call from a post office employee at 6:45 this morning, telling me my new bees had arrived (now that’s the kind of wake up call I don’t mind!). I went and fetched them while Sofía was in preschool. It’s a strange, almost fey thing to be handed a heavy wooden box, […]

The garden’s new shape is certainly coming along. Those 6 hours of work I got done on Mother’s Day has really made a difference! Before: After: I only had enough mulch for a few pathways (free mulch is hard to come by), so I elected to only do the pathways along the beds that still […]

After a lovely morning involving GF pancakes and lots of sleep, Josh surprised me with a promising new book. Sofía gave me a beautiful painting she’d worked on, and a little book she wrote that said “my mommy is as smart as rain.” (No idea). Lilu gleefully ate the tissue wrapping paper. Then I skeptically […]

I was supposed to get a beautiful day of gardening, all by myself, as my Mother’s Day gift. But the skies exploded, dumping hail and flood upon us. The garden is under an inch of water. The broilers are standing in a miserable peeping huddle in the middle of an ankle-deep puddle that is their […]